5 weeks

5 weeks feels like a milestone. I walked back from the park with Pip this afternoon and I didn’t feel worried by looking after her. I’ve finally started getting to know her and have started to fall in love with her. It feels less like a very small stranger came to live in our flat and more like she is supposed to be here. Even her screaming in the queue in Marks and Spencers didn’t faze me like it would have done previously

Last week, I was asked straight out if I was depressed. The health visitor skirted round the issue* (I saw her notes had a highlighted *history of depression* marked out on them – her bizarre questions just made me angry) and I’ve obsessed over the question, tears streaming down my face. Faced with at least the requirement for an internal response to the depression question though and the answer crystalised. Not depressed. Just adjusting.

That isn’t to say that I’ve worked out how to be a parent. I haven’t. Not even one bit. Real parents don’t wake up in the middle of the night and shout at their babies to be quiet. Or, at least, apparently that is what happened. I don’t even remember it. I’ve just started to be able to breast feed and stay asleep. That’s helped. That and the arrival of some sunshine. It’s a lot easier to make yourself go out of the house every day if the sun is shining.

I think it’s also helped that Pip’s personality is starting to show. She interacts with us more and we’ve started to understand her more. She has discovered her hands and can grab things; she has unfurled and is starting to look more like a baby girl than a new born. She follows us with her eyes and has fallen in love with her rabbit mobile, wriggling to the music on her changing table and reaching towards the revolving rabbits.

*and her visit is a whole other post…

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3 comments

My psych told me there is an accepted “normal adjustment” period of around three months after having a baby (sometimes more, sometimes less), I wish I had been told that when F was born, I would have felt a lot less pressure to “feel normal”. Especially when that is silly, the old normal doesn’t exist after you have a baby, it’s all about letting go of that and setting in to a new normal. And I’m of the belief there is no such thing as a “real” parent, especially a parent who doesn’t shout at their child to be quiet in the middle of the night. I once told G I didn’t like F when he screaming and wanting to be ON ME all the time, I just wanted G to take him away and give me a break. Having a little baby (or a child of any age really) is EXHAUSTING, it is the hardest job in the world. Hey and breastfeeding hormones can do funny things with your brain sometimes (they definitely did for me), I found it helps to keep that in mind. Have you got a Mum’s group, do they have them in the UK, organised by the nurse to begin with, they must? I didn’t want to go to mine for the first little while, I didn’t feel like it was for me, we all had such different backgrounds, but now I wouldn’t trade my relationship with those women for anything in the world. Being able to blurt it all to someone going through the same thing, it helps so much. And it’s great for your baby, playing with other babies wears them out with all the stimulation and the best thing about that is then they SLEEP xxx

Lots of mums get the “baby blues” which is different and less severe than real post pardum depression, and typically temporary and short, it sounds like thats what you are coming out of. I know one gal who felt sad and worried for weeks, tearful about her baby boy and another who took weeks to really love her baby, she loved him in his care and needs but it took a bit for her heart to really unfold. Your baby is fed, cared for, dry and loved you are doing well, good job mama, the rest takes time.